CHAPTER V
_"Tom Paine, Infidel."_
... These are the times that try men's souls. The summer
soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis,
shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands
it _now_, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman....
I have as little superstition in me as any man living; but
my secret opinion has ever been, and still is, that God
Almighty will not give up a people to military destruction,
or leave them unsupportedly to perish, who have so earnestly
and so repeatedly sought to avoid the calamities of war, by
every decent method which wisdom could invent.--"The
Crisis."
I want you to note carefully the title of this chapter. And then I
want you to note still more carefully the quotation with which it
opens. It was the man known far and wide as "the infidel,"--the man
who was denounced by church-goers, and persecuted for his unorthodox
doctrines,--who wrote with such high and happy confidence of a fair, a
just and a merciful God Almighty.
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